ABSTRACT
The exhibit was strikingly simple in its design, yet supposedly also surprisingly compelling as one walked inside it. The best way to picture the exhibit was to visualize a large grid on the ground, like a big piece of graph paper, although no marks were actually on the ground. In the center, called ground zero, was a smooth circular piece of concrete, one foot in diameter. The exhibit itself was a large circular “forest,” 200 feet in diameter, with ground zero at
which was a perfectly cylindrical smooth wooden stick 10 feet high and 1 inch in diameter. These sticks were spaced precisely two feet apart along the imaginary lattice points on the ground (see Figure 1). The two foot corridor between the rows and columns of the “forest” easily left room for a person to walk through and to contemplate the barrenness of the seemingly endless array of plain smooth sticks as compared to the appearance of a lush, green forest of real trees. The analogy between this urban jungle and a real forest was, in Melby’s mind, precisely the analogy between man-made beauty and natural beauty.
